Tag: method

I had many long conversations in this space, back then: some with physicists (and one biologist!) on physics and on reading Plato’s Ion, for example. (The “Wiley Socrates” thread.) You’ll also find here two posts and some discussion on Shusaku Endo’s great novel Silence, along with a series of posts on the television series Dollhouse; one post on the philosopher and theologian Kevin Hart; and many others on other topics.

The “Wily Socrates” posts constituted my first attempts to convey — to those in the sciences — the early-Greek scene of knowing and its dynamic theory of knowing, which launched the Arts & Sciences tradition out from the academies of Plato and Aristotle, established in classical Athens during the 4th century BCE. But this distinctive tradition of inquiry and education would not be a Western tradition. . . .

Now, in 2019, I’ve prepared a NEW “deepgraceoftheory ” website, in order to roll out the results of all the years of thinking and study I have done since this original weblog was operating — thinking, that is, about the brilliance of the scientific method, and about the dynamic early-Greek theory of the exquisitely-skilled and highly-evidentiary arts of knowing cherished by the Greeks, and by their successors in so many lands and amidst so many different cultures and religions. (Again, this “philosophical” tradition does not belong to the West, although early-modern, high-modern, and post-modern philosophy certainly does.)

Each of the Greek disciplines, the Athenians had called a met-hodos — because it was regarded as a “way” (a Greek hodos, or “road”): each pathway being precisely the one “along which” and “by means of which” (meta-) it would be possible for disciplined knowers to travel-toward the truths of their be-knowns, respectively, in each case. Do you happen to remember the “sublime” Parmenides, and his heroic narration concerning the Way of Truth? This was the poem whose epic language first established the philosophical Journey of Knowing at the very core of what constitutes a meaningful human life. For Hypatia or Cicero or Ibn Sina or Aquinas and Dante. Not to mention for the thinkers and artists we know as the Renaissance Christian humanists, among whom Galileo was one . . .

The many distinctive and various Greek “ways” or “pathways” for knowing would be called the via later on, during Latin epochs, and the terms hodoi or methodoi were similarly translated into languages such as Arabic and Persian and Hebrew — everywhere, in fact, where the Athenian vision of a certain bracing education that liberated precisely by means of the irreducible differences between the various modes of investigation, and their to-be-knowns) was welcomed and embraced. Or it wuld be better to say that this was the case during the first 2000 years or so of the Arts & Sciences tradition . . . For, after that, the understandings of philosophy, and of the arts and sciences, changed fundamentally, at least in the West.

When the relaunched website is ready, I will post the link HERE.

At the same time, I will list links there to the major discussions on this earlier weblog, this one you are at, so that you can easily find them, if you wish. And also to the Pages where in 2007 I put some old lectures on the history of literary theory, which emphasized Ferdinand de Saussure and the crucial dynamics of double articulation in language. (Something which the classical Athenian philosophers were fascinated by, and very attentive to. ) These links will be posted HERE soon. Or you can find them in the Archives